Shifting to a bike-centric cityscape is a huge shift in infrastructure, if you start mapping out all the components that need to come together for it to happen at this stage. Like I live in Vancouver, where our council has for a few decades put a heavy priority on building segregated bike lanes and connecting paths that are pretty well totally removed from cars. I happily ride my ebike around the seawall during the spring/summer/fall a couple times a week. The weather is mild, albeit rainy, pretty well all year. The terrain is generally pretty darn flat. We’ve had local e-bike vendors for a long time. We have bike share stations provided by Rogers (formerly Shaw) along most major transit routes. That’s still not enough to make vancouver into a bike-primary transportation city. Hell, with reports of ebike batteries exploding periodically, one thing you’d need to add in is mandatory secure ebike parking in condo buildings (we recently had an apt building go up because of it, causing something like 24 people to become homeless) – which’d mean all the older buildings would need to retrofit things. The list just goes on and on.
And again, in the context of “change all cities in the country to preference ebikes and alternative transport” vs “build EVs in Canada”, the former is far more drastic. So if someone wants to put it forward as a realistic/plausible option, beyond just fantasy, they need to really spell out how it’d function, the cost variances / savings they claim would occur, and all that jazz. I’d love to see how it’d be economical for tiny towns in northern BC/Alberta to switch to e-bikes as a primary mode of transport, I just don’t think it’s realistic. It’s the more extreme position to take, so someone should back it up. And, like I said earlier, if they can do that they ought to pitch it to the greens.
Shifting to a bike-centric cityscape is a huge shift in infrastructure, if you start mapping out all the components that need to come together for it to happen at this stage. Like I live in Vancouver, where our council has for a few decades put a heavy priority on building segregated bike lanes and connecting paths that are pretty well totally removed from cars. I happily ride my ebike around the seawall during the spring/summer/fall a couple times a week. The weather is mild, albeit rainy, pretty well all year. The terrain is generally pretty darn flat. We’ve had local e-bike vendors for a long time. We have bike share stations provided by Rogers (formerly Shaw) along most major transit routes. That’s still not enough to make vancouver into a bike-primary transportation city. Hell, with reports of ebike batteries exploding periodically, one thing you’d need to add in is mandatory secure ebike parking in condo buildings (we recently had an apt building go up because of it, causing something like 24 people to become homeless) – which’d mean all the older buildings would need to retrofit things. The list just goes on and on.
And again, in the context of “change all cities in the country to preference ebikes and alternative transport” vs “build EVs in Canada”, the former is far more drastic. So if someone wants to put it forward as a realistic/plausible option, beyond just fantasy, they need to really spell out how it’d function, the cost variances / savings they claim would occur, and all that jazz. I’d love to see how it’d be economical for tiny towns in northern BC/Alberta to switch to e-bikes as a primary mode of transport, I just don’t think it’s realistic. It’s the more extreme position to take, so someone should back it up. And, like I said earlier, if they can do that they ought to pitch it to the greens.